Today's Internets.

Are You An Addict?: "I am an addict and my addiction has been going on for years.  I spend a lot of my day thinking about this addiction and will sacrifice almost anything to get it.  In just a day or two going without it, I experience withdrawal symptoms that can only be remedied when I have another fix.  Even after that fix, however, I am almost immediately consumed by thoughts of how I can have more.  I constantly crave and even dream about my addiction.  When I am unable to satisfy my habit, I feel irritable and become uncomfortable to be around.  Many people around me don’t understand why I act and do the things that I do on a daily basis as a result of my addiction.  To them, I am a real junkie.  My addiction has removed people from my life and brought other characters that share my vice into it.  I don’t really think I am doing anything wrong and although people have tried to make or convince me, this is not something I plan on ever giving up.  I don’t want anyone’s help and am not looking for recovery…  You see, I am addicted to positive self development through physical training."

Interesting.

Don’t Believe The Lies About Foreign Brides: "Next up is the Centre for Immigration Studies who again state a 20% divorce rate with mail order bride marriages. A separate organisation comes to the same conclusions the Immigration Department did, focusing on statistics gathered from foreign countries and agencies as they try to build a picture. Again, we see the same statistic: 80% of the marriages have been successful."

Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice."

Death by Loophole - By Rosa Brooks | Foreign Policy: "If you were worried about whether it was okay for the U.S. government to secretly kill an American citizen overseas, you can relax: The Justice Department says such killings are hunky dory, as long as some "informed, high-level official" decides that citizen poses an "imminent threat" and capture would be "unfeasible." Like many legal documents, this one does fine on its own terms, but looks a lot less satisfying when taken out of its hermetically sealed legal universe. In other words, it's all tree, no forest -- and it nicely illustrates the fact that "legality" is not the same as morality or common sense. 

...here's the problem. This isn't World War II. When the "enemy" (not just a few of the enemy, but all of the enemy) wears no uniform and appears on no traditional battlefield -- when there's substantial disagreement about what it means to be a "combatant," a "belligerent," or to "participate in hostilities" -- stating the legal principle that even U.S. citizens can be targeted if they join the enemy in a war against the United States tells us nothing whatsoever. It restates a legal truism, without offering any criteria for determining who's an enemy beyond stating that U.S. citizens who are "senior operational leaders of Al Qaeda and its associated forces" are targetable anywhere on the globe. But what's a "senior operational leader"? How is that defined? How many "senior operational leaders" are out there? And what's an "associated force" of al Qaeda? That's not defined either. For that matter, no criteria are offered for determining whether or not there's an armed conflict in the first place. Is the United States in an armed conflict with, for instance, al Shabaab in Somalia? Is al Shabaab an "associated force" of al Qaeda? 

...what constitutes an "imminent" threat? Traditionally, both international law and domestic criminal law understand that term narrowly: to be "imminent," a threat cannot be distant or speculative. To the Justice Department, however, "distant and speculative" are apparently perfectly consistent with "imminent": According to the white paper, the requirement of imminence "does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.""

Sex and Punishment: Eric Berkowitz Talks 4,000 Years of Judging Desire - Reason.com: "Eric Berkowitz, author of Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire. "After we ate the apple and did what we did, the sex organs to Augustine became like little dictators that we have to either succumb to or overpower."  ReasonTV's Tracy Oppenheimer sat down with Berkowitz to discuss original sin, trends in sex laws, and societies' perceptions of sexual transgressions."

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Coming Out of the Locker Room Ghetto: "Some questioned why a man my age would watch a show about girls in their twenties, as if they'd just discovered me hanging around a school playground with a shopping bag full of candy in one hand a fluffy puppy in the other. Of course, these critics are right. When I read Moby Dick I first had to convince the bookseller that I was a former whaler named Queequeg. When I read the poetry of Sylvia Plath, I had to pretend I was a depressed white woman with daddy issues. Don't worry, I used a fake ID."